The Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) says the country needs bold and coherent policy changes to attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) in the post-COVID-19 era.
Yewande Sadiku, NIPC’s executive secretary, who spoke at a webinar, said the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that global FDI inflows will fall by at least 30 percent as a result of the pandemic.
“The expectation is that the impact will be worse from a FDIs perspective than what we saw during the global financial crisis,” Sadiku said in a statement on Monday. “I think the headwinds that we see 2020, 2021, 2022 suggest that we will need bold and coherent policy changes and deep economic reforms to reverse the trend that we expect.”
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Sadiku said NIPC tracks investment announcements and what it has seen based on those announcements is that there has been some pressure in recent times.
“COVID-19 obviously is expected to put that under more pressure, so we’ll need to undertake investments supporting policies more urgently in order to reverse the trend.
“And what we expect from this, first, is a flight to quality and the winners invariably would become economies that continue to provide investors with an attractive prospect but in a conducive business environment.
“We believe that there will be an increase in the domestic production capacity, in particular of items that are considered essential or basic to every country and they’ll be different from country to country.
“Across government agencies, we need a concerted coordinated effort at managing investor concerns to minimise what we expect as job losses and to restore confidence,” she said.
Sadiku noted that some sectors have benefitted from the pandemic while others have made losses from it.
“For those that have suffered from the pandemic, I think it’d be useful to remove administrative and regulatory bottlenecks to allow those sectors to flourish,” she said, adding that it is important to “aggressively” encourage more Nigerians to invest in the country.
